Alfred Brendel is definitely a strange character!  For those who only know
him from his studio recordings or his earlier efforts, I can only point to
his 1995 live recording of Beethoven's op 106, which was just now broadcast
on the radio as part of Philips' Great Pianists series.  For much of the
performance, I could hardly believe my ears: where I knew Brendel as a
rather corsetted and scholarly musician who showed only occasional flashes
of spontaneity and inspiration, and who was pianistically very austere,
here I was listening to a completely different person: the first movement
grand and fiery, with varied repeats!  (different fermata lengths and
doubled octaves the second time round, as well as more subtle shifts in
emphasis); the scherzo more familiar Brendel, grittily humorous rather than
driven and mysterious as in Ernst Levy's recording; but the slow movement
was perhaps the strangest of all: no 'black pearl' this, but rather
swiftly moving, full of a painful anxiety relieved by only brief visions of
calm - and throughout an unabashed pathos in the declamation that reminded
me very much of Claudio Arrau - although Arrau achieves his emotional
intensity by distending the phrases, whereas this playing was full of
nervous energy.

Unfortunately the same unfettered intensity miscarried in the recitative
between the 3rd and 4th movements, Brendel beginning too loudly and not
being able to evoke the 'gradual awakening' from the depths of the slow
movement to the anger of the fugue - and the fugue itself was a let-down,
weighty rather than furious, and not free like the other movements, but
chugging along metronomically.  There was nothing like the cumulative force
of Ernst Levy's rhapsodic interpretation.  But on the other hand the moment
near the end of the fugue, where the quiet new theme is introduced, had,
for want of a better expression, a great spiritual quality - and many
individual details of the fugue as well as the other movements were
extremely vivid and tonally superbly chiselled.

So pretty much a curate's egg (other bad points: the recording is
unsatisfactory - rather close and with the perspective not always clear -
and Brendel leaves very long pauses between movements, during which you
can hear the audience coughing) - but a fascinating one as regards the
possibilities of Brendel the pianist, and in the first and third movements
giving the rare sense, which Hofmann in his great days must have conveyed,
of an almost recreative freedom that is anchored in complete intellectual
and technical mastery.

Highly recommended!

Felix Delbruck
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